The author explores how Russian government officials and judges interact with the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) and argues that the Russian judiciary may be the most ECtHR-friendly branch of Russian government. Russian judges increasingly refer to the jurisprudence of the ECtHR, despite facing a host of pressures to do otherwise. As a result, the Russian legal system’s adherence to the standards of the 1950 convention is a complicated work in progress that develops in fits and starts and in which those in power wrestle with the question of their legal autonomy to limit the domestication of European human rights standards in Russia’s governance.